In numerous patent-related fields, including patent application drafting, prior art searching, and patent application examination, comparison against a collection of patent and non-patent references is usefully and often. Traditionally, the comparison process is a manual process, whereby a researcher examines or reads an input text, and then manually searches for references related to that input text.
In the context of patent application drafting, an application drafter will often review the prior art in order to better frame the application for examination. In certain cases, an application drafter will conduct a review of the prior art before application drafting with only an invention disclosure. In other cases, or in combination, an application drafter will conduct a review of the prior art after preparing a draft of the application.
In the context of prior art searching, a patent searcher will review an invention disclosure or other input and conduct a review of prior art in the field. In other embodiments, a patent searcher can conduct a landscape search for a particular technology or field.
In the context of patent examination, patent examiners often classify the application then look for prior art references in the same field, then apply these prior art references to the application in order to determine if the application meets the requirements of being unique and non-obvious over the prior art references. Moreover, as the number of patent applications being filed continues to grow, there is a need for facilitating examination of applications.
In one example, described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,774,833 to Newman, entitled, “Method for syntactic and semantic analysis of patent text and drawings,” a semantic and syntactic method of processing patent text is disclosed. Methods disclosed determine the meaning of the patent text in addition to an analysis of the grammar and punctuation of the patent text. This approach therefore identifies respective meaning of the text but does not derive nor extract the critical concepts found in the patent or its claims.
In another example, described U.S. Pat. No. 7,113,943 to Bradford, et al., entitled “Method for Document Comparison and Selection,” describes methods and systems for searching a collection of documents for material of relatedness using a Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) approach. Similarly, this approach does not obtain or extract the concepts found in the collection of documents in order to correlate or compare such concepts semantically to determine overall comparisons.
In another example, described in U.S. Pat. No. 9,075,849 to Barney, entitled, “Method and system for probabilistically quantifying and visualizing relevance between two or more citationally or contextually related data objects,” a method for probabilistically quantifying a degree of relevance between two or more citationally or contextually related data objects is described. Data objects disclosed include patent documents, non-patent documents, reported case law, web pages, personal and corporate contacts information, product information, consumer behavior, technical or scientific information, and address information. Again, this approach does not extract the concepts of the data objects in order to perform a semantic comparison. As a result, systems and methods using this approach unable to determine overall semantic comparisons for the data objects.
Therefore, there is a need for systems and methods for semantically differentiating and comparing an input text against a collection of references to obtain similarities, differences, and uniqueness of the input patent.